Jetpack 3.9 — Sitemaps, a new Skype Sharing Button, and More

With the release of Jetpack 3.9, we’re introducing a brand new module, as well as a lot of improvements for several existing Jetpack modules.

Jetpack’s new Sitemaps Module

Jetpack already includes features like Subscriptions and Publicize, to let your readers know whenever you publish a new post on your site. You can now let Search Engines know, too!

What are sitemaps? Sitemaps are files that list each post and page that should be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing.

Once this new module is activated, two sitemaps will be created: a generic sitemap, available at yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml, as well as a News Sitemap, available at yoursitename.com/news-sitemap.xml. The News sitemap is useful if you want your posts to appear in Google News.

A new Skype Sharing Button

Now that Skype offers a Skype button, we’ve added it to Jetpack’s Sharing module. To add it to your site, head over to Settings > Sharing in your dashboard, and drag the new Skype button to your list of sharing buttons.

Social Menu

Social Menu is a new tool that is available for all theme developers. It allows site owners to create a new menu location which is used to display links to Social Media Profiles.

To learn how to add Social Menu support to your theme, you can follow the instructions on our support page.

And More…

This release also adds its fair share of improvements to existing modules, as well as bug fixes:

Added new options to allow management of users on your site directly from WordPress.com or from the WordPress.com Desktop app.

Made several changes to Photon to improve compatibility with WordPress 4.4. Custom image sizes are handled better now and all responsive image sizes will be properly displayed when using the Photon module.

Photon is now enabled by default on sites using HTTPS. You don’t need to use a filter to enjoy Photon on your HTTPS site anymore!

Added support for Wistia oEmbeds.

Fixed some issues with long album and track IDs in the BandCamp shortcode. Also added support for two new parameters: tracks and esig.

– Google XML Sitemaps offers an options page allowing you to customize the output of the sitemap. If you’ve used these options to customize the sitemap, you’ll want to stick with Google XML Sitemaps.
– Jetpack’s Sitemaps module creates 2 sitemaps: a regular sitemap.xml, as well as a News Sitemap for Google News. If you want to submit your site to Google News, I’d recommend deactivating Google XML Sitemaps and using Jetpack’s Sitemaps module instead.

To protect your site’s performance, only your last 1,000 posts are included in the Sitemap. If you would like your sitemap to include all posts, I’d recommend installing a Sitemap plugin that will indeed use sub-sitemaps.

If you already use Yoast SEO, Jetpack’s Sitemaps module won’t be activated.

Since Yoast SEO’s sitemap offers you more options in the SEO menu, and will list all your posts with no limits, I’d recommend that you keep Jetpack’s Sitemaps module off, and use Yoast’s Sitemap instead.

once activated, the regular sitemap is showing but the news one is not. URL is a 404. Help? 🙂

This shouldn’t happen. Could you send us an email with more details about your site, so we can take a look?

After 5 or so minutes, it appeared. Maybe given my 4000+ posts indexing took awhile? However, there are no actual posts listed in the sitemap even though the page is now there. Perhaps it only shows new post or is still indexing? I liked the idea of Jetpack since it does News and I’m indexed by Google. Don’t think Yoast does that and don’t need most of Yoasts sitemap config options.